President Barack Obama is coming to Minneapolis on Monday, Feb. 4, to advance his proposals to reduce gun violence, which is a little bit like taking a boat out into the middle of the ocean to discuss the risk of fire in Joshua Tree National Park.

Why doesn’t he go to Chicago, where there is gun violence?

And then, once in Chicago, why wouldn’t he discuss that city’s problem of gang violence?

In fact, so long as he has the itch to take his bully pulpit on the road, Chicago is the natural, ultimate stop. Why, it is ground zero. Just last week, Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old girl who had performed with the King College Prep Band at Obama’s inaugural festivities, was shot and killed as she sought shelter from the rain in a park about a mile from Obama’s Chicago residence.

About three blocks from her school, Pendleton and a group of 10 to 12 other young people, some of whom were on Pendleton’s volleyball team, crowded, we can presume gleefully, under a canopy as a storm approached. According to reports, a man climbed a fence at the park, ran at the group and opened fire. Then he ran away, jumped back over the fence and got into a waiting car. Pendleton was shot in the back and later died at the hospital. A boy was shot in the leg.

Police said Pendleton had no arrest record. There was no indication that she was a member of a gang or even the gunman’s target. Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said there are no indications that anybody in Pendleton’s group was gang affiliated. Police figure that the shooter was a member of a gang that considers the park their turf and that he mistook somebody in Pendleton’s crowd for someone in a rival gang.

In other words, there are apparently gang members in Chicago who spend their days on watch so that they might just shoot whoever steps onto their perceived territory. Pathetic.

Pendleton’s death was the city’s 42nd slaying in the deadliest January for gun violence in more than a decade. Last year, 2012, ended with more than 500 killings. The gangs in Chicago are shooting up the place.

But Obama is coming to Minneapolis. It is in response to the slaughter in Newtown, Conn. — the president went there, didn’t he? — that the administration is advancing a ban on so-called assault rifles, limitations on high-capacity magazines and universal background checks. It is believed that Obama chose Minneapolis because last September there was a workplace shooting at Accent Signage that left five people dead before the shooter killed himself. A horror, to be sure.

Chicago is a much more dramatic backdrop, but a backdrop that would force the president to address political difficulties that have nothing to do with guns — moral decline, a corrupted sense of entitlement, lack of integrity, broken families, absent fathers and deep generational voids in just the simple understanding of what is right and what is wrong.

Politically, it is much easier to stand around in Minneapolis and call for more gun control, which would not accomplish very much at all to address the problems that have made Chicago a corrosive murder capital.

And how could he call for more gun control in a city that has the toughest gun laws on the books? There isn’t even a gun shop in the city of Chicago. They are outlawed.

The White House sent condolences to the family of Hadiya Pendleton. He does her and the next innocent child shot a disservice, disingenuously showing up in Minneapolis. He knows what the problem is.

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